Jason Robards

  • Comes a Horseman (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) Jane Fonda as a single rancher. James Caan as a WW2 veteran helping her out. Jason Robards as a local tycoon aiming to control an entire valley. An oil executive in the area to make an irresistible offer for what’s under the ground. While none of this is uninteresting, you have to keep in mind that Comes a Horseman is a typical revisionist 1970s western. It’s sober, slow, tinted brown-on-beige, obsessed with not doing the same thing as decades’ worth of westerns but, at the same time, not as successful at holding an audience’s attention. Director Alan J. Pakula is only too happy to feature social commentary on sexism, sexual abuse, rapacious oil exploitation and the impact of war even on the American hinterland. Alas, it’s a snore – if you though Heaven’s Gate was too long and slow, you clearly haven’t seen Comes a Horseman yet. There are a few good moments, but not enough of them to matter and by the time you read about the film’s production history to discover that a stuntman died while shooting the film (with the footage preceding the accident easily identifiable in the finished film), it’s enough not to care about the film at all.

  • Hour of the Gun (1967)

    Hour of the Gun (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Hollywood’s determination to make an endless number of movies about the O.K. Corral gunfight is no match for my determination to not care about any of them (well, maybe except for Tombstone). In Hour of the Gun, we find ourselves once again at the Corral — but taking a slightly different direction, the film begins with the shootout, then follows the aftermath of the events as the Clanton gang is run down. Much of the films’ interest comes from featuring James Garner as Wyatt Earp and Jason Robards as Doc Holliday — as a capable duo of actors, they can hold our interest longer than the script. Otherwise, much of Hour of the Gun feels like a feature-film length epilogue to another story, and one that’s powered more by American West mythology than intrinsic storytelling qualities. I’m sure that within a few decades, machine learning will be good enough that we’ll be able to point a moviemaking engine to the dozen O.K. Corral movies and generate a mash-up combining the best elements of all. That will probably be more interesting than watching the source movies themselves.